Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Links for 5/12/10

Those majoring in peace and conflict studies, development studies, and rhetoric...

It seems, reading through the lines of what they say, that the modal teacher in those programs approaches their educational mission as though they have a dire and urgent need to deprogram young minds that have been enslaved to the harsh market-ueber-alles doctrines of neoliberal capitalism and classical economics.

The problem is that these nineteen year olds are from the upper-middle class of twenty-first century California and are at base do-gooder meritocrats deeply suspicious of large greedy corporations that repeatedly and recurrently try to sell them junk that they don't really need. They have not only not been programmed by the ideologies of neoliberal market capitalism and classical economics, they barely know that they exist at an ideological level…

If you are going to turn every class into a wrestle with the ghosts of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, you will look silly unless you first make sure your students know who you are wrestling with, and why your struggle is such a desperate one--why their arguments have force and power...

The University of California took 2,300 fewer students, Cal State enrolled 40,000 fewer, and the California Community Colleges turned away nearly 250,000 students last year… The dream of offering universal access is crumbling…

When those paid from public coffers cease to feel any obligation to recognize that public resources are limited or that others, suffering through the same turbulent times (or those that won't draw their first paycheck for awhile yet), must foot the bill, it raises questions about whether public servants have morphed into public claimants. Something seems fundamentally off when irresponsible spending is justified as a matter of "fairness."

I must confess that belonging to the de facto elite minority makes me very uneasy. Most tenured faculty view themselves as superior teachers with superior minds. In this view, the arduous six-year tenure process clearly proves that all of us are superior to "them" and have deservedly earned our superior jobs by our superior gifts and our superior efforts…

While instances of dumpster diving are rare, adjunct shopping is typically limited to thrift stores, and decades-old cars sometimes serve as improvised offices when these "roads scholars" are not driving from campus to campus…

what does it say about my entire profession when over 70 percent of those teaching in American colleges today are precarious, at-will workers? This new faculty majority, frequently and erroneously mislabeled as part-timers, are often full-time, long-term perma-temps, whose obscenely low wages and total lack of job security constitute what is only now being recognized as the "dirty little secret" in higher education…